Joining Music with Reason

In the preface to this marvellous new anthology, its editor, Christopher Ricks, writes: "Dr Johnson couched his high praise of poetry in these terms, and with reason, in The Rambler No. 86 (12 January 1751): ‘The poet has this peculiar superiority, that to all the powers which the perfection of every other composition can require, he adds the faculty of joining music with reason, and of acting at once upon the senses and the passions.’"

Ricks was Oxford Professor of Poetry between 2004 and 2009, and during his tenure arranged for 29 poets – a roughly equal mixture of British and American, established and new – to read from their work when he was in Oxford to deliver his lectures. Joining Music with Reason brings together a generous selection of work by all of those poets as listed in the 'Poets' tab below

Joining Music with Reason not only bears out Dr Johnson's claim for poetry, but also substantiates Matthew Arnold's, that the best of it "will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining and delighting us as nothing else can". It also promises to help dispel the mid-Atlantic fog that in recent decades has obscured all but a handful of the best-known American poets from a British audience and all but a handful of the best-known British poets from an American.

Joining Music with Reason

Reviews of Joining Music with Reason

Joining Music with Reason … holds … som,e wonderful work by relative unknowns … [L]ike many of Waywiser’s other productions … it is overtly traditional: plenty of poems use rhyme and metre, and many make even more explicit links to older traditions, since they are translations, or adpatations, of poems a century or a millennium old. (Such adaptations themselves have a long tradition: Catullus’ Sappho, Wyatt’s Petrarch.) John Talbot, once of Boston University, now of Brigham Young University in Utah, braids classical learning with snarky modernity:

Tityrus, we are getting kicked
Flat on our taxes. We are getting shown
The low road out of Sudbury, thank you three
Car garage and vaulted great room new
Construction in executive neighbourhood
Neighbourless horse property. The rich
Plot hurts where I have stooped to its rough kiss.

.Yet some of the best surprises in Ricks’s anthology come from poets who do not much use older forms. Caroline Bird won some fame for poems about teenage life written when she was in her teens; I didn’t much like them then but she has either improved or selected well from her own work. In ‘Grand Finale’ she mocks lust, love, ambition, tradition and herself: ‘What starts in a husky voice must end with an email./I smoke on this dry stone wall and wait for the saxophones.’ Bird ends another poem with a slogan that might, for good or ill, apply to many anthologies: ‘It’s as if no one’s listening except us.’ Mark Halliday records more serious doubts about what poets do these days: ‘Down Here’ records a conversation with an ex-girlfriend, or an ex-wife. ‘Poems are not what I care about,’ she tells him,

because
to me what counts is for people to notice how other people are feeling
and to respond to that right then and for people to give each other
little surprise presents and to phone someone and say ‘How are you doing’
in a real way and to talk to people about what matters to them
outside your own little world of crystal treasures.
That’s what I look for in a person and what happens is,
we do our best and ultimately a few people visit us in the hospital
and then we die.

It seems hard for any poet (avant-garde, traditional, what have you) to mount a defence of poetry after that; and yet Halliday has done it – modestly, paradoxically – and done it well." –– Stephen Burt